ABSTRACT
Seoul has come a long way since the 1960s. It was a relatively small and underdeveloped city of about 2.5 million population of an agricultural country, struggling to accommodate the growing numbers of migrants from rural areas, who largely settled in the city’s burgeoning slums. Seoul’s impressive growth and emergence as a global city today is not simply a by-product of Korea’s overall economic development. Although the country’s economic advancement has contributed considerably to the city’s modernization and development, the previous chapters in this book have examined how and why the state has launched a series of urban and spatial policies that have coincided with, and at times even preceded, economic development. The Korean development experience has been a dynamic one, where both economic and urban development policies have mutually reinforced each other, and together have resulted in the megacity of Seoul it is today.
